Wednesday’s loss to the Montreal Canadiens was the latest in a terribly disappointing season in Winnipeg. They lost 7-4 and failed to get above “.500” again — it was the fifth time the team had an opportunity to get above that mark and the fifth time they failed with a poor effort.
The Jets started the game trailing 2-0 after the first four-plus minutes and tied it up shortly after. By the end of the first they trailed by a goal again and allowed two more goals four-and-a-half minutes into the second period. Paul Maurice had had enough and, as you probably know, he absolutely flipped on his team during that second period (see video at the top). They were struggling to get shots and they were allowing too many goals.
After the third Canadiens goal in the first period, Maurice pulled Connor Hellebuyck for Michael Hutchinson. It didn’t make much of a difference as Hutchinson allowed four goals on 23 shots, but after the game Maurice wasn’t blaming just his goalies for the disaster.
“It was the whole f—ing game, from the goaltender to every guy out front,” Maurice told the media after the game. “We’re not walking away going our goalies gotta play better. We didn’t play well enough to win that game. (The goalies) didn’t play well enough to win that game, but they’re no different than everybody else in that room. We were horse—- from the start, from the drop of that first puck to the very end of it.”
Look, it wasn’t a good game by the Jets. At one point, in the second period, the team went 17 minutes with one shot on net. This shot chart from Corsica.Hockey puts into context how long the Jets went without creating any real offence.
Here’s the thing, though: at the end of the game the shot totals were 30-27 for the Habs, so with a steady presence in net the Jets could have survived those 17 shot-less minutes and come out OK on the other end.
While the Habs allowed four goals on 27 shots their goalie performance isn’t being discussed because, hey, their backup played. Al Montoya has a .907 save percentage this season.
You know what the Jets’ team save percentage is in all situations this season? It’s .900 — fifth-lowest in the league.
In October, the Winnipeg Jets were often being mentioned in the same breath as the Montreal Canadiens. Winnipeg was expected to be one of the best Canadian teams, but currently rank the worst of the seven. The goaltending situation was assumed to be good enough because Hellebuyck was coming off a season in which he posted a .918 save percentage. The fact Ondrej Pavelec was playing in the AHL wasn’t expected to be a huge factor, because he was the worst of the three Jets goalies (the other being Michael Hutchinson) last season.
The Jets are at an interesting crossroads here. The roster is still the second-youngest in the NHL, but they’ve invested big money and term in prime-age players such as Dustin Byfuglien, Blake Wheeler, Mathieu Perreault, Tyler Myers and Tobias Enstrom which suggests they have their eyes set on not just making the playoffs, but doing some damage in them.
The problem is they’re running with a 23-year-old goalie getting a major NHL workload for the first time in his career. Hellebuyck has already played seven more games than he did all of last season and has a mediocre .910 save percentage.
Now, Wednesday’s game was a complete disaster with many missed assignments and lazy plays from the forwards and defence. As Elliotte Friedman noted on the Sportsnet broadcast, even after Maurice’s meltdown, the team didn’t respond.
“I think the other thing too is that when he had his angry moment it didn’t get a lot better,” Friedman said. “They got a fluke power play right away because Torrey Mitchell shot the puck into the crowd and they scored a power play goal, but that was their only shot in the first 17 and a half minutes of the second period.”
So on its own, the game was an all-around poor effort — after all the Habs lineup was without some key injured players in Brendan Gallagher, Alex Galchenyuk and Andrei Markov and they started their backup goalie.
But it also underlined a weakness in the roster that has contributed the most to this disappointing half of a season.
That weakness in goal has opened up a few questions. Should Ondrej Pavelec (.912 SP in the AHL) get called back up and be given a shot, or at least push the young goalies for time? Has Maurice run his course behind the Jets bench and should the team replace him?
What are the Winnipeg Jets? Are they a potentially dangerous playoff team, or did we completely mis-read a mid-rebuild team that is still experiencing those growing pains, especially in net?
The aggressive thing to do is get out in the goalie market and acquire a Jaroslav Halak, or perhaps whichever of Michal Neuvirth or Steve Mason the Flyers would part with. They do have roughly $6 million in cap space to work with.
On the other hand, with such a young roster, perhaps it is best to just stick with the youth that’s also in net, which may be an Achilles heel now, but still has plenty of time to blossom. And there have been signs that Hellebuyck will blossom, from his steadying NHL performance last season to the .920-plus save percentages he had in the AHL.
If the Jets are to make a real push for the playoffs, they probably will need to make a change in net. But is that really the best course for this team? They’ve been a generally conservative franchise in terms of player transactions under GM Kevin Cheveldayoff, so we should maybe expect them to stay the course and wait for the better days that are surely ahead.
Maybe we just miscast the Jets from Day 1.
